The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with dis-closures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
In recent years, the phenomenal growth of mobile Internet services and proliferation of smart phones and tablets has increased a demand for mobile broadband services. One solution to provide higher network capacity and enhanced user experience is a network topology using a mix of macro cells and small cells. An exemplary system based on such a network topology includes an enhanced Long Term Evolution (LTE) macro cells deploying local access points, in which some user traffic to/from a user device may be offloaded to a small cell while control traffic to/from the user device uses a macro cell deploying the small cell. A user using the user device may walk from a small cell to another small cell that is deployed by another macro cell but the user expects that there are no service interruptions. However, an inter-small cell handover requiring an inter-macro cell handover will cause some latency to user traffic.